With improving technology and medical procedures, knee, hip, ankle and other orthopedic surgery has been greatly refined in the recent past, and is more widely available and performed every year. While surgical procedures and techniques have improved, post operative treatment typically includes prevention of unnecessary residual joint stiffness and focuses on achieving maximum functional range of motion as soon as possible.
In order to achieve optimal recovery, early assisted and active joint motion is generally encouraged. In the past, physical therapists, physicians, and clinical staff were often required to manually assist recovering patients in therapy movement of reconstructed joints and the like. Additionally, beforehand there has not been available a simple, safe, and reliable apparatus for encouraging and enabling early assisted and active joint motion by the patient.
Physical therapists have been known to use bed sheets tied around a patient's foot to induce ankle joint motion after surgery. Obviously, this is a time consuming, inefficient, and, at times, unsafe manner of accomplishing prompt rehabilitation of affected joints. As can be imagined, the unreliability of such makeshift therapy equipment tends to add to the cost of health care and discourages patients from continuing therapy on their own to improve their range of motion when not supervised by a professional therapist. The use of bed sheets and other previously available devices can also allow for uncontrolled movements, slippage, and the like which, in turn, can cause pain, injury, lack of confidence in the therapy, and less willingness to undertake such therapy.
Follow-up surgical repair work after ankle and other joint surgery are considered by some as a surgical complication, and risks associated with such postoperative surgery include anesthetic complications, wound dehiscence, infection, etc. While complications cannot be avoided in all instances, it is believed that most such complications occur in cases where assisted and active joint motion therapy was not aggressively undertaken. Consequently, a reliable and simple device which can be used by the patient to facilitate and increase postoperative flexion and range of motion exercise of affected joints is needed and has heretofore been unavailable in the industry. Additionally, while the above-described paragraphs discuss achieving maximum functional range of motion as soon as possible after a traumatic injury and ensuing surgery, equally important is achieving maximum functional range of motion for elder persons and diabetics.
Accordingly, what is needed is a simple, safe, and reliable orthopedic rehabilitation mechanism for therapy and rehabilitation of a joint which has undergone reconstruction, prosthesis implant, orthopedic surgery, degradation because of age or diabetes, or the like that does not have the drawbacks of the prior art devices.